Dr Koontz and Rev Fisk begin with a chat about screen time habits, being “book smart” but not wise and how Martin Luther hoped his teachings would vanish so as to not overshadow the Bible. The Revs discuss the importance of face to face interaction and learning from parents.
They then continue dissecting the history of the Spanish Civil War, discussing the ideological division which made it and the growing intensity of each side's rhetoric for the other in divided countries; the Two Spains and more relevant, our Two Americas. They also talk about the real life consequences and death tolls from civil war, the imposition of the government on the church, and the necessity of organizing your faction to survive.
Finally, they encourage the church to be prepared. The doctrine of Two Kingdoms is not a call to passivity, but merely a reminder that the State and the Church have different priorities. Recent controversies over covid mandates have shown us how much we police each other when we should be unified. Don’t be reactive, don’t be blackpilled, which is bad for your soul, but get organized to stand together as a body of Christians.
References:
“Kid Prison” episodes of BHoP starting here
“Communism and the church” by Alfred Rehwinkel
Visit our website - A Brief History of Power
Many thanks to our sponsors, Blessed Sacrament Lutheran Church in Hayden, ID and Our Savior Lutheran Church and School in Pagosa Springs, CO
Dr Koontz - Agrarian, Egghead - Concordia Theological Seminary Fort Wayne
Rev Fisk - Author, Fanatic - St Paul Rockford
Music thanks to Verny
Transcript:
[Speaker 2] (0:06 - 0:12)
Dr. Koontz, how much screen time off work hours do you enjoy every day?
[Speaker 1] (0:13 - 0:41)
Screen time off work hours would probably be 45 minutes. I'll look at news and stuff in the morning and then maybe in the evening. And I'll read blogs like it's 2007.
So that's kind of my off work time. I find that otherwise it's kind of corrosive if I do more than that, 45 minutes, maybe an hour on the weekends when I have more free time.
[Speaker 2] (0:42 - 0:44)
What kind of corrosion are we talking about here? [Speaker 1] (0:45 - 1:37)
Corrosion especially of capacity for work, which I like working. So I resent that corrosion and it corrodes, especially capacity for focus more than anything else, intellectual focus, but also willpower. So I don't like that.
So that's why I have to limit it. And I understand if people need to get like a dumb phone rather than a smartphone to do that, because I think we all realize that the problem is common. So any way that you can retain focus, retain willpower, build those things up is going to be helpful to you.
And it doesn't have to be that you mainly work inside your mind or something. Even if you work with your hands, you want focus. So that's always helpful.
So that's why I have to limit it.
[Speaker 2] (1:38 - 1:41)
So have you given much thought to how it does this? [Speaker 1] (1:43 - 1:44)
Demons.
[Speaker 2] (1:44 - 1:54)
I'm with you, I'm with you actually, but I think the demons are at work in the first article and we can even see the magics at work in some of the science and stuff maybe. I don't know.
[Speaker 1] (1:55 - 2:05)
Yeah. The way that this happens is by giving you a sense of possibility on the screen that apparently doesn't exist in your life.
[Speaker 2] (2:05 - 2:07)
Amen. You're so spot on. That's exactly right. Good. Keep going.
[Speaker 1] (2:08 - 3:20)
So what it provides you is a substitute for what your willpower and your focus could actually bring into being in your life. Like the actual gifts that you've been given by God can be used to improve life, to make life better for yourself, for other people, for whatever purpose. And the screen sucks those things away and provides alternate sets of possibilities seemingly limitless available without work.
So if I don't limit my screen time to information or if you want to call it screen time, if I'm listening to something when I take a walk or something, but I'm not really looking at the screen and I'm listening and I'm generally being informed. So that doesn't feel like the same thing, but even clicking, I mean, articles work this way, right? Blogs could work this way.
Informational things can work this way where it's still sucking away your focus and your willpower, even though you now know way more about, you know, the true story behind Watergate or whatever you were doing on the screen. And the really weird thing is that a book on the exact same topic, a physical book doesn't do the same thing to your brain.
[Speaker 2] (3:21 - 3:21) That's right.
[Speaker 1] (3:21 - 3:43)
And it also seems that there's a level of activity even involved in reading. Although I will provide this caveat is that books can function, especially for people who read a lot of them, the same way that screens function for just a much larger swath of humanity. That is, they actually hijack your own capacity to put things together.
[Speaker 2] (3:43 - 3:45)
Yeah. Can I speak to that for a second? [Speaker 1] (3:45 - 3:45)
BHoP 060 Death Comes (En Espanol) 1801
Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (3:45 - 4:39)
I've been thinking about this a lot on that and everything you just said is like it's genius, it's beautiful. And I've been thinking about it in the terms of what does book as medium do differently? And on one, on one very first principle way, nothing.
It's just much slower. You can rewind it, parse it. You can study the life of the author, kind of know what they're going to try to do to you, kind of know what assumptions they're making that aren't real.
So you can be like, oh yeah, I just dismiss that. And I'm not talking about like Harry Potter's magic. I'm talking about her theology.
Right. And so to be able to do that to a book is far easier than to do that to a blog post or a soundbite or even a movie. And so, you know, books, while they retain some of the same philosophical or epistemological function, maybe is the way to say it, they are of a different medium, of a different age and an age that in fact built stuff straight up.
[Speaker 1] (4:40 - 5:20)
Right. And I think that, and we were just talking about this today on the Discord, I think that relative to the human voice and human interaction, books are impoverished. And so if you want to start in a good place to begin to gain useful wisdom, then you need to start with life and with other people.
Books can supplement and far less even than that, things from screens can supplement. But you're not actually designed to interact with the world mainly through screens or mainly through books. And the problem is that books have become books.
Books are the sort of like fetish object for some people. [Speaker 2] (5:20 - 5:21)
Absolutely.
[Speaker 1] (5:21 - 6:30)
We're having books or these are the books that I'm reading or these are the books that I've read. And look, I love books. I'm currently surrounded by them.
But, you know, they're not a substitute for being able to gain wisdom from life. And the distinction that's always existed and could be pushed in false directions, but I think is basically right between street smart and book smart, is a distinction between, you know, understanding that you can learn lots of things. And I mean, the research for the show is almost entirely from books.
So I find the stuff, I hope you find it too, the listener, useful. But if you can't actually gain wisdom from the people and the events right around you, then you're not actually getting wisdom. You can gain knowledge, which is how you can be book smart without being otherwise smart.
And the vision in Proverbs is that you're gaining wisdom from what is said to you and then from how what is said to you by another living human being actually plays out in life based on your observation and integration of that with what has been said to you by your father and your mother.
[Speaker 2] (6:30 - 6:30)
Amen.
[Speaker 1] (6:31 - 6:39)
Yeah, so that integration of wisdom is why the living human interaction and voice needs to be prioritized over everything else. So, yeah.
[Speaker 2] (6:39 - 7:04)
To do a subtle under run on that, I don't think you'll mind. I would suggest that at this point in history, we can affirm also that there is one single book that has in fact been designed for you to live in in such a way that no fantasy will emerge, but rather a reality substantially more wise than the current one you're probably living in. And in fact, picking up Proverbs as a father, like if you don't do this, there's going to be no voice anywhere leading anybody.
So yeah, thank God we have that book.
[Speaker 1] (7:04 - 8:11)
Yeah. Yeah. And when and when Luther talks about his own writings, which are voluminous, as you know, and he considers what happened before the Reformation, he actually has a desire for the extinction and the eclipse of his writings.
Now, he says this different a little differently in different places, as is his want, as is everybody's want. Honestly, everything was just recorded when he said it and wrote it. But generally, he wants his writings to go away.
So that the Bible is not eclipsed, stuffed under the bench is the way that he says it vividly, stuffed under the bench the way that it was before the Reformation. And I think that that humility about one's own words and weight is not something that a lot of Luther's disciples have paid attention to regarding Luther, but it also is not something that when you're thinking about Luther is a media phenomenon, which I think we've mentioned on here before enough people have paid attention to. That is, media are useful.
Podcasts are useful. Books are useful for a time. But I'm perfectly willing for all of it to disappear.
[Speaker 2] (8:11 - 8:31)
I fully expect my YouTube channel to vanish one day. There are people trying to save it. I'm like, go ahead.
You go for it. But for Luther to have the prescience to see what was going to be done to his name tells me something about how much time he spent in the Proverbs. So you should do it, too.
And you'll have that kind of life. Let's talk about the two Spains.
[Speaker 1] (8:33 - 11:00)
Yeah, that's a hard shift, but it's worth it. Yeah, it's a phrase that comes out of books. And that is significant because as we talked about with the episodes on Germany, all the things that we're considering in the series on collapses of different kinds, military collapse, we're on political collapse here with Spain.
These are all things that are inside media driven environments, so people are united by media. And this phrase occurs, first of all, in the 19th century, which we really haven't talked about with Spain and we don't need to particularly, except to note that the divisions that produce very large numbers of deaths, as we're going to talk about today on both sides in the Spanish Civil War are divisions that were analyzed and reanalyzed and redefined for at least 70 years prior to the Spanish Civil War.
And the idea of the two Spains is simply that inside the borders of the country, the main division was not between the different regions, which is kind of a classic centuries long way of dividing up Spain. And there's still some of that and there's obviously some of that. And we'll talk about that next week as well.
But that really the difference was groups of people maybe living right next to each other in the case of large cities who have completely different visions of life. One Spain was a Spain that was very much influenced by the French Revolution. It was secular in outlook.
It was liberal, if not leftist in its politics. It desired republicanism in government rather than the tradition of Spanish monarchy. On the other side, you had a Catholic Spain, not just generically Christian, but Catholic.
And that would be conservative, especially royalist in its politics, and would almost certainly be monarchical or monarchist. There were a small number, some of them influential intellectually, small number of, let's say, conservative Republicans. But that tended to be eclipsed by all because even eventually under Franco's dictatorship, there was a plan at the death of Franco to have a king back, which is what happened in the 70s, which is actually what led to the end of a conservative Spain.
But that's a story for later. [Speaker 2] (11:01 - 11:11)
But this division, the division was not mainly he just fled the country like two months ago or something. The king of Spain just left Spain in exile, like recently.
[Speaker 1] (11:11 - 11:17)
Yeah, that has to do with a controversy about his family's personal habits and spending. [Speaker 2] (11:18 - 11:22)
Do the British have that problem at all? I'm sorry. Go on.
Go back to the go back to Spain.
[Speaker 1] (11:23 - 12:26)
Yeah. So Spain, the idea is that the primary division in a polity and the reason that you would have, as you do, they're just not called this civil strife or civil war. You have this the first time the monarchy is deposed, when the monarchy is restored.
After that, this is all in the 19th century. You have this during what's called the tragic week, which is earlier in the 20th century than the Civil War. You have this when the dictatorship is imposed in 1923.
You have this when the republic comes in in 31. You have this, obviously, in the Civil War from 36 to 39 is that the primary division between human beings is not ultimately it's not even ethnic or linguistic or regional as you might expect in Spain, although those lines also exist. They're not unreal.
But the primary division between people is ideological. And that that actually is what will finally issue in full blown, years long civil war. Are these two Spains that cannot live in the same house?
[Speaker 2] (12:26 - 12:54)
You got me wondering if there's such a thing as a war that is not ideological at its root. But I'd rather back up and say that it sounds to me like this non-regional ideological visionary of two different futures. Again, non-regional is going to be directly connected to the amount of blood that gets shed in this thing, right?
Like if you're if you're split regionally, it's easier to concentrate your bloodshed, I think. [Speaker 1] (12:54 - 13:40)
Right, because where you have for for various reasons, exceptions to this. So the big exception to this is the Basques who don't speak Spanish. They're a distinct group to some extent, genetically, definitely linguistically.
The Basques really want autonomy and for that reason will often be sympathetic to leftist causes, but are not, for example, anti-Catholic because of the unique formation of their ethnic groups. That's why I said these kind of ethnic or linguistic considerations are not unreal, but they create vastly different outcomes than what you see over most of Spain, where because the divisions are ideological, my neighbor is the problem, my literal neighbor is the problem.
[Speaker 2] (13:40 - 13:47)
Yeah, the guy with the two different flags that are different than my flags and I got to get a third flag and make my flag better than his flag. And then we can like maybe be blue instead of purple.
[Speaker 1] (13:48 - 14:41)
So, yeah, so that's I mean, I think that that way of understanding what came to pass and especially the violence that I'll talk about today is fundamental to understanding why we would talk about ideology as a dividing line in America, because there are other calculuses that you could have for politics, for civil strife. And it's not that those don't matter at all, but it's that the ferocity and the levels of violence and the numbers of dead, especially between thirty six and thirty nine, but both before that and after that in Spain are largely explained by this concept of the two Spains. That otherwise it's like, why would people be this savage to each other when in the whole scheme of things they don't.
[Speaker 2] (14:41 - 14:53)
Otherwise differ that much from each other, they don't see the good of the baby as the important thing, they're more concerned about themselves. Sounds like something Solomon faced once upon a time to bring it to the two Americas.
[Speaker 1] (14:53 - 15:51)
I mean, there's a parallel. There's a big parallel. And I don't like maps of America that are maps of presidential elections, not only because of election audits, but also because I don't think that it reflects the reality of America.
BHoP 060 Death Comes (En Espanol) 1806
That is that what you should really look at if you really just want an electoral map, you can use a presidential election map, but at least break it down by county, if not by municipality. And what you see is that even every, quote, blue state has. Tons of red America inside of it.
And most red states, but not all of them, most red states have some little blue pocket, I mean, even Wyoming has, you know, I think it's Teton County where Jackson Hole is, which is, I think, the wealthiest county in the United States.
[Speaker 2] (15:52 - 16:08)
Wow. That's fun. That's that's fun.
So when you look at the city, normally cities are right. So you have like you have almost always blue cities and then you have states that are blue because they have blue cities, even though it's red everywhere else. But there's just bigger than the red land.
Right.
[Speaker 1] (16:09 - 17:12)
And the exceptions to this are relatively few. You'll have rural blue counties in, say, Mississippi or Alabama that are majority black or majority Hispanic counties, southern Colorado, hearts of New Mexico. But generally speaking, anything that is not a city.
Is going to be blue or I'm sorry, it's going to be red, anything that is a city is going to be blue with a few exceptions. Teton County, Wyoming, blue, Jacksonville, Florida, red, actually, Miami, historically red because the Cubans are historically Republican. So there are some exceptions.
But what you can see is that we're all living to one degree or another with greater or lesser proximity. We're all living with people who at this point share a completely different visions of life with one another when they do open their mouths. But basically, they're just sharing space with each other.
[Speaker 2] (17:14 - 17:14) Health care.
[Speaker 1] (17:15 - 17:17) Yeah, maybe for unvaccinated. [Speaker 2] (17:18 - 17:20) That's what we were sharing.
[Speaker 1] (17:20 - 19:35)
I mean, I think we were sharing. It was a human right until recently. Health care.
We're we are sharing a country. We're sharing cities. We're sharing especially states is the level on which this is almost always true with people that have completely different definitions at this point of man, of woman, of marriage, you know.
And the thing that happens in our media and certainly our academia, usually before our media, is that the things that the definitions given to those terms, man, woman, marriage, whatever else, baby, fetus, child, alive, unborn parasite, whatever health care, those definitions, whatever they are, will increasingly be disparaged as far right or extremist or even at this point, as we've talked about before, terroristic. And the definition provided by whatever is blue, whether it's a college town in an otherwise deeply red state or it's a major city in an otherwise red state or it's a it's a blue city in a blue state.
Whatever that power base is, because that's where media and and academia, it has its production base, those places are going to give you the sense that all the other stuff, which if you look at an electoral map on a county or even a municipality basis. America is largely a continent populated, sometimes sparsely, especially in the Western half. It's a continent populated by, quote, far right extremists with pockets that are not populated by, quote, far right extremists.
And the categorizations don't run equally vehemently in the opposite direction, that is red America, wherever that's found, does generally not define blue America. As evil, necessarily, that is happening more and more recently, not so recently, until recently, what it what it often is, is a categorization as stupid or crazy.
[Speaker 2] (19:35 - 19:35) Yeah, true.
[Speaker 1] (19:36 - 20:22)
And I see that a lot, especially the older the person is, it seems to me the likelier they are to call someone like, you know, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez stupid or crazy. It's becoming much more common, and I'm really seeing it at things like school board meetings. It's becoming much more common to call the policies and the ways of blue America, especially the more kind of openly antagonistic they are.
I mean, you know, his patience is wearing thin, Biden says. The open antagonism from blue America and the open disdain is creating. Ways of reacting, which are generally unprecedented, that is, the right is beginning to say we cannot live with these people, which the left has said for a very long time.
[Speaker 2] (20:22 - 20:33)
Yeah, yeah. But it's become clear that the left means it, I guess, would be one way to look at that. So the right is waking up to to acknowledgment that the left really means, no, we can't live with you and we're going to kill you.
[Speaker 1] (20:33 - 21:37)
Right. Right. And I think I think that immersion in left wing environments such as I have in my past and such as many of the listeners have in their past immersion in left wing environments creates this fight or flight response.
That a lot of Americans have not had to have until very recently, right, that is, OK, I'm either I am either evil for whatever intersectional reasons you have, I am either evil or you're evil for propagating lies. You're not just crazy, you're not just stupid. I mean, I could say that about somebody that I'm like tolerating, he's making a lot of noise in a restaurant, but, you know, I'm not going to ask to have him kicked out or I'm tolerating him because he's kind of silly or or, you know, says weird stuff.
That's OK. I could even hang out with that guy. But now he's saying, no, you need to be kicked out of the restaurant because you're unvaccinated.
Well, that's a fight or flight. I either stay there and stick up for myself or I leave in accordance with his saying.
[Speaker 2] (21:39 - 21:42)
Yeah, you either get ruled by him or you rule yourself. Right. [Speaker 1] (21:43 - 23:30)
Exactly. So I think that these ways of defining and red and blue is kind of, you know, that's a little inexact at the point where the major question is vaccinated or unvaccinated. Yeah.
And that that one is cutting in some really interesting directions. I mean, if you're in the Postal Service or you work for or are a member of Congress, you don't have to get vaccinated. But there's also the and the stories are not reported in the same way.
Unvaccinated when it's when it's pejorative, they'll often talk about Republicans or white evangelicals or something, but they'll be relatively sympathetic generally to urban blacks who also aren't vaccinated at the same levels that, you know, suburban whites are, for example. So you have a lot. This is kind of the fun thing about history and also politics is you never know who's going to end up on the same side.
So right now, you know, there's somebody who has voted in, you know, the Bronx her entire life for very left wing candidates who is black. And what I have in common with her is that Joe Biden's patience is wearing thin with both of us. So so the definition of, OK, there are two.
What are those two? And you could make the case there are four. There are 16.
I mean, go for it. But the definition of two, I think, is something that is much more fluid than maybe we thought. It's really not just although it sometimes is Republican and Democrat, it is at this point possessing access to things that the government wants control over or not.
Right. Which is an expanding list itself. So the definition of the two Americas is in flux. But I think it has been there for a long time.
[Speaker 2] (23:31 - 23:54)
It's those who trust the machines and those who don't. I think and those who are saying who are beginning to not, whether they know it or not, you know, trusting information across the computer or the TV less than they used to. And they're kind of like this can't be just absorbed.
And then you have the group that's like, no, it's telling the truth. Do it. Whatever it says. [Speaker 1] (23:55 - 24:02)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that this is something that is going to play out in extremely strange ways.
[Speaker 2] (24:02 - 24:02) Amen.
[Speaker 1] (24:04 - 25:46)
Because the definition of people is either vaccinated or unvaccinated. That the reason that is such an enormous political risk is because you take those coalitions that we talked about and talking about the Spanish left and we said intersectionality is a tool of the left because it works on grievance and you need to get you need to cobble together different grievances. So intersectionality allows you to do that, providing both an enemy and also an in-group.
Vaccinated, unvaccinated blows up some of some of the things drawn together by intersectional politics. For instance, it leaves out the question of race. It leaves out the question of membership or non-membership in a union.
And so I think they are risking quite a lot on this. But one way that they'll get away with it as a distinction, at least in certain states, if not nationwide, eventually the way that they'll get away with it is because I think very often. American conservatives, both organized politically, but also just people sitting at home listening to this, live in reactive ways, not just reactionary, but reactive.
And so they say, oh, well, now you're trying to impose a vaccine mandate. We'll take it to the court. See you in court.
Well, why didn't you make it criminal to do this beforehand? Why didn't you criminalize this? Because the left is about to criminalize your unvaccinated existence.
Why didn't you criminalize not vaccination, but enforcement of vaccination? Why didn't you criminalize mandates months ago when we were already talking about it?
[Speaker 2] (25:46 - 25:55)
They're going to say we did, it's in the Constitution. And they don't agree with you or know that you had this idea that there's multiple regimes since the Constitution. And yeah, they had to go back and listen to some episodes.
But that is what they would say.
[Speaker 1] (25:55 - 26:39)
Yeah, maybe that's right. But, you know, I mean, I think that when you are reactive, you're always living inside their frame. And when you live inside their frame, that will enable you.
I mean, they're going to make mistakes and create what I what I'm saying, you know, in the case of vaccination status is a big political mistake. But you need the Republican congressman from somewhere safe in Tennessee or Wyoming instead of reacting. I guess the Republican congresswoman from Wyoming is Liz Cheney, so she's got her own stuff.
But you need them to stop reacting to things and and just kind of grandstanding. You need them to reach out to whoever is in charge of the South Bronx in Congress and offer something.
[Speaker 2] (26:40 - 26:40) Yes.
[Speaker 1] (26:40 - 27:05)
And you need a certain amount of creativity here. And often the right is defined not by creativity, but by reactivity. So it's not ready. And I can I see the right still in secular politics. And the church still trying to talk itself into the idea that it might have to die. That's good.
I mean, that is possible. But before that happens, is there anything you can do? [Speaker 2] (27:06 - 28:28)
You know, there isn't because they're too busy reacting online. They're too busy reacting to the news. They're too busy thinking that the news about far away matters.
So Biden Biden said what Biden said. I've heard it now from five or six sources. And you know what?
It really kind of tickles me since speaking in the royal plural and maybe being demonically possessed all would have someone talk like that. So I can laugh at it a lot. But the fact is, it doesn't even bother me because whenever he gets around to finally trying to do something here, it hasn't changed yet that much.
What bothers me more is that the poor immigrants, minorities, a bunch of different diversity at Walmart have their kids wearing masks and they just don't know. This is everybody there and they just are people, you know, walking along. So that's what I care about.
Right. That's what I'm going to get bothered by. That's what I'm going to brainstorm how to do something about.
Right. And honestly, so what did I do? I have a tract on how masks are bad for your health.
And I've handed out a few times just as I go and come from the store. The very impetus to do that is the willpower to see that the problem has to be a local problem. That's where the war really is going to be fought.
And Biden's going to sit there and kind of just try to distract me one way or the other because that's all he is. He's a puppet. Yeah, he's a puppet who actually feels sad these days.
Another story I heard, I don't even know if it's true. I heard he went to like a high school to talk and they booed him and he felt bad.
[Speaker 1] (28:29 - 28:30)
Oh, man.
[Speaker 2] (28:30 - 28:47)
It's to understand what he's doing for the country. The poor man, the poor puppet. I don't know.
But we got to stop reacting to him. Start pondering where our feet are and start lifting up a willpower to do something about where our feet are, because, yeah, racks and lines waiting for them to come and help. You're waiting for someone else.
[Speaker 1] (28:47 - 30:18)
Yeah. And I had a listener bring this up with me, a great guy, very perceptive. He said that if we don't, if we're not organized and this is precisely the point I was going to make today, and I just talked to him today, not about this, but about about reacting, not about Spain, but about reacting, is that on the left and the right in Spain in the 1930s, both of them are organized.
Sooner or later, they're both they're both they both have things working and what and what I mean by that is all levels of challenge. So you can focus on the military engagements that they fight, but they also have things like support systems if you need food in it, especially in cities, stuff like that. You can be taken care of by people.
OK, if the left is able to provide that through generally the means of government in the United States because they control it or the educational system, if they can keep people inside of it or whatever other means. Right. If they can provide that, then they have political wherewithal not only for survival, but also for expansion.
I thought about this and what he and I were talking about today was especially churches. Right. So if you have a church and you want to survive.
And you don't want to get to a point where you're now telling each other why it's OK that you have to be vaccinated to get into the church building. I mean, we are we have a precedent for that with you have to have a mask on to get in the church building, why you have to be vaccinated to get in the church building.
[Speaker 2] (30:18 - 30:28)
I don't want to have a story from someone who visited in the last week and they said they went to church. And the first thing that was said, then they're visiting a church. First thing, are you vaccinated?
They're asked the moment they walked in the door. [Speaker 1] (30:28 - 30:29)
Yep. There you go.
[Speaker 2] (30:29 - 30:31)
You're not going to grow church to see. [Speaker 1] (30:31 - 30:38)
No, no. And you're and we're already doing it to each other. And nobody's legally mandated to be vaccinated to go to a church in the United States.
[Speaker 2] (30:39 - 30:39)
Yeah, right.
[Speaker 1] (30:39 - 30:55)
OK. And the issue here is, I said, you know, once again, OK, call their teachings what you will. The Mormons are living in reality and we're not.
They own ranches. They own data centers. They have all kinds of stuff.
What do we have? What are we ready for?
[Speaker 2] (30:55 - 31:02)
We send our children off to the concentration camp. You got to go check that out. That's what six part series on education, school, prison.
[Speaker 1] (31:02 - 31:11)
I mean, even where we have a parallel system, the parallel system basically, as we talked about, generally just inculcates whatever the mainstream system wants it to hold out, sold out, sold out, sold out.
[Speaker 2] (31:11 - 31:13)
I have a question for you. Go ahead. Go ahead.
[Speaker 1] (31:13 - 31:13)
Go ahead. No, go ahead.
[Speaker 2] (31:14 - 31:19)
I have a question for you that might take us a touch off and we'll come back then and pick up the fighting in Spain directly.
[Speaker 1] (31:19 - 31:20) Sure.
[Speaker 2] (31:20 - 31:47)
But this is a question for something you said. I don't know. It's got to be like episode seven.
OK, so if any of you out here have listened all the way, you might you might be like, OK, thanks for asking. You said a long time ago. That men don't follow ideology.
And and and you got me to just really ponder that for a long time. But today you made the case that everything's being driven by ideology in the two Americas and the two states. And so what I want to know is where in the twain shall meet.
[Speaker 1] (31:48 - 32:48)
Yeah. The twain shall meet in that you have to articulate some ideology. That's how the group doesn't just get ruled by people's personalities.
OK, but. People do not join or stay in groups for purely hard. I mean, somebody does, but very few people do join or stay in a group for purely ideological reasons.
There are elements of friendship. There are elements of charisma. There are elements of leadership and especially the capacity of leaders to motivate and to put something positive in front of people's eyes in the view of present suffering.
So, yeah, that's that's what I'm saying is that although human beings are not motivated by ideology, ideology or doctrine, if you want to put it in theological terms, has to be articulated in order for the group to center on something other than the personalities of people who either are untrustworthy or will at the very least one day die.
[Speaker 2] (32:48 - 33:31)
That's good. That's good. You said human beings there, and I like that move a little bit because so my summary of pondering this up to this point is this, that men follow men who follow ideology.
And this is just to throw a hat to Solomon. You know, out of a thousand, I found one. And I think there's something there that the men who become the great men of history are really concerned about the ideology of the thing, that that's what they're often pursuing is some battle with their own will in some way.
Right. But it ends up being for the good or ill of the community because, you know, ideology has consequences and it might be bad ideology as we're kind of seeing now when two at least contrasting ideologies come to terms against each other. So briefly, when the two Spains fought, who died?
[Speaker 1] (33:32 - 37:24)
The estimates are very interesting in the way that they're articulated. So everyone admits that both sides, the nationalists, also called the whites, and that's a linkage back to the words used for the different sides in the Russian Civil War, right after the Russian Revolution, the whites and the reds or Republicans both killed people in. Non-military extrajudicial ways or with a really slight pretense of legality or judicial decision making, non-military extrajudicial, not assassination, though.
There are some there are assassinations, like we talked about last time, but what we're talking about as far as as far as death tolls are not assassinations of high figures, political leaders, military officers. We're talking more about everyday people. So the targets of that from the right, their targets are generally going to be people they perceive to be covert Republicans in captured cities, especially because the left generally does better in cities.
They're also going to include foreigners because the presumption is that if you're a foreigner and we'll talk about that next week, but most foreigners, but especially Russians and Americans and Frenchmen are probably communists. And so they're suspect from the left. The targets are usually going to be, above all others, priests and nuns, religious in Catholic terminology, religious as a noun.
In addition to that will be devout Catholics, people fighting on the other side are suspected of doing so. So the categorizations are kind of predictable. The thing that is unpredictable, especially if you're reading in English language sources and to prepare for this, I didn't read anything in Spanish, so it could be different.
I don't know. But in English language sources, your historians are almost always going to be very sympathetic to the left. So here's how the tolls are going to sound.
The toll from the left. How many people did the left kill and what's called the red terror? That toll is going to just include people that the historian recognizes as having been executed.
Things like mass graves, not near a battle site, stuff like that, or numbers of priests killed or nuns raped and murdered. When they're talking about the right, they will include not just those numbers, which may or may not be lower. I mean, it's a little it's hard to know.
And every and everyone admits that. But they'll also include numbers from what are openly battles. This is how historians like Stanley Payne or Anthony Beaver can say the white terror, that is what what the right did, was far worse than the red terror.
So statistics that we have is of massive confusion and slaughter with some specific targets from each side. The way that it's retold is, yes, the left targeted people. Yes, they raped nuns.
Yes, they burned down churches for years and then they killed the priests. But on the right, they killed all these people. And you never get the context that this was in a battle and the left was doing the same thing.
And, you know, none of that is provided. So that's just something to know about. The historical account is that the nature of bias in the writing of history is not sometimes it is just sheer omission, but much more often it is framing rather than omission.
And the framing here is that the left was targeted, if gruesome, the right was indiscriminate and gruesome.
[Speaker 2] (37:25 - 37:26)
Statistics lie.
[Speaker 1] (37:27 - 37:59)
Yeah, I mean, right. The framing is the lie. You know what I mean?
Not not the not the recounting. And also the thing that you notice is that certainty about evils. Can it can itself be a lie because it's a deduction from your own framing.
So once you frame something in a certain way, then you're going to make all these inferences that based on your, quote, data. Makes sense and appear to be completely true and unassailable.
[Speaker 2] (38:00 - 38:01)
And it's called confirmation bias, right?
[Speaker 1] (38:01 - 38:07)
Right. They're dependent on your framing. They themselves are just sort of amplified lies.
[Speaker 2] (38:07 - 38:47)
Yeah. And which repeat themselves and confirm themselves. That's why confirmation bias is detrimental to any kind of thought.
And yeah, so the story, if you had trouble with the word framework, just throw the word story in there. It works pretty well. So, man, the the telling of the story about the white and red terrorists.
Yeah, that does sound like the way I remember much being taught about the history of right and left in America. You mentioned the priests and nuns. You've mentioned the churches.
Is there anything else like in that vein that is like the horrors we want to focus in on or do we want to?
[Speaker 1] (38:47 - 43:33)
Yeah, I mean, we we don't need it. We don't need to do stories. I mean, like specifics of what happened to this or that person.
I mean, close to 2000 people have been considered they've been beatified by the Catholic Church because of their sufferings during the 1930s in Spain. And some maybe close to 500, I want to say, have actually been canonized as saints. And so you can go look up those stories, just look up Spanish martyrs of the Civil War and you'll find these sorts of stories.
I think something to notice for the church today, and this goes back to what this perceptive guy I was talking to recognized, is that there wasn't actually in Spain in the 1930s, either from the Catholic Church in Spain or from the Catholic Church worldwide. The same dynamic that I find in the American church of all different kinds, which is the Spanish and the Catholics worldwide recognized that things like the 1931 constitution that came in with the Second Republic telling the churches how their property may be used was persecution. And that that would lead to worse things.
That not coincidentally, with that constitution and those mandates began to come the burning of churches, which we mentioned last time with the burning of churches began to come physical assault on both religious and also those attending mass. And physical assault eventually became rape, eventually became murder. Very gruesome things, that's why we're not going to all these stories, but if you're interested, you can look those up.
I think that Americans often wait to figure out how to tell themselves why what is being done is OK. They don't have the same forthright opposition to impositions on the church by the state that the Spanish and the Catholics. I mean, there's an entire papal encyclical saying what is going on in Spain.
I think it's 1933. So this precedes the Civil War. This is during the Republican period of government saying this is evil, this is wrong.
OK, and that that that stance of opposition is not, you know, in in Lutheran terms, a confusion of two kingdoms. It's an assertion of the prerogatives of the church. Right.
And the the interplay between state and church does not just want to run one direction, which I think that many American Christians presume that is state and church are separate. But if the state wants to regulate the church, its finances, what it can talk about, don't say this, don't say that politically, then it can do that. American Christians tend to forget something that I think the Spanish were much readier for and therefore were ready to defend themselves, especially when violence came.
They remembered that the church has its own prerogatives, and so the church may assert itself. And this goes back to something that we that we've talked about in different terms before, which is that politics is the art of individual and collective self- assertion, and that if you do not assert yourself politically, right, legally, whatever arena we're talking about, if you do not assert yourself, something will be asserted for you. I mean, I'm sure if I dug into the sources, especially in Spanish, I would find that there were Spanish Christians saying, it's OK, what the state is doing to us, it's fine, we probably deserved it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm sure I could find some of the same things we're saying now. But what I see very often in American churches is very different of the preponderance of the record from Spain, which is in America, we are very quick to tell each other why we need to obey regulations on our worship imposed by the government. But if you want to oppose those things, that's up to you.
You're on your own. And when we put each other on our own, inevitably we will be swallowed up because the reason that communism doesn't actually take over Spain. Even before the outbreak of open hostility in 36 is because the right is organized, the churches are organized in their own defense.
So when Franco comes to power, they're not blessing every single thing that he or his side has ever done, but they sing today throughout Spain when Franco comes to power because they recognize this means that the state will no longer be hostile to and destructive of even of the life of the church.
[Speaker 2] (43:34 - 44:20)
I want to I want to just kind of take a random shot in the dark and imagine it's a guess I guess a guess that all of these priests and nuns and Catholics were like praying to Jesus this whole time with everything that they are, that they would get through this thing. I just want to I want to suggest that no matter how many of us are doing that as American Christian churches, whatever else we do, if we're not doing that, we lose. And yeah, that's it.
That is that is it. If we don't do that, we lose or get swallowed up. But if there's just if we're small arcs, I mean, we have the God who saves and you have Dr. Kuhn's telling us all this for a reason, right?
Like we're supposed to see from this that it isn't all black pill again.
[Speaker 1] (44:20 - 46:57)
No, and and I mean, black pill is just about the worst thing you could do for your soul, because one, you're asserting that the news is determinative of the future, which is to concede magical power to some miserable human being who works for The New York Times. And then in addition to that, you're also saying that you bear no responsibility. You you reserve the right to be reactive in the privacy of your screen as the world gets progressively worse.
And what I'm saying is that in addition to prayer, they accepted responsibility for their own existence. Martyrdom is one option. There were other options they used.
All of them redounded finally to the survival of the church in Spain, because this is a this is a point that's made by a guy that I've been reading a lot of recently, Alfred Rehwinkle, in a book that no one remembers that Concordia Publishing House published in 1948 called Communism in the Church. He spends a lot of time in that book recounting communism's effect, as he did before World War Two in a book called The World Today. The effect of communism.
Of the thoroughgoing reign of leftism and a polity on the Christian church, and he said, for example. It could be, he writes in 1948, it could be that the Lutheran Church in the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore because it just wasn't widespread enough to exist. So it couldn't even it didn't even get the chance to compromise.
It just probably won't even exist. Now, thank God that turned out not to be the case after the fall of the Soviet Union. But based on his knowledge of what had happened in the Russian Civil War, he said it could be that it doesn't even exist anymore.
We don't really know. Because of the numbers of dead, because of the numbers of pastors shot in the head. So when you think about certain things, they are not merely matters of political preference.
I mean, we don't we don't we're not talking, you know, property tax versus state income tax on this show. I mean, we can if we want to. But we're talking about things that are generally existentially important to people, but in this case, to the existence of the church in a particular place.
And the strategy that the Spanish Christians took was to say it's legitimate that we exist. We will determine what we do with the things that belong to the church and we will survive. And some of them died for that.
Many of them died for that. But they did persist. They did survive. And they they do exist today.
[Speaker 2] (46:58 - 47:31)
I think it's awesome. And I think the same before about prayer, what I want to suggest is that that kind of practice will create an ownership of the moment, which will then compel you to take a fair assessment of your reality and act on it because you're not you don't think you've done something when you've prayed. You know, you've asked God.
Right. Right. When you when you go on the computer and you you pray to the computer instead, I mean, think about it.
You think you've done something, don't you? No. Right. Think about it. Just think about it. Yeah.
Yeah, you can go on from there.
[Speaker 1] (47:31 - 47:54)
Yeah. So I think I mean, that's that's what I mean by the idea that that the church has the defense of the church has two levels. One level is to put into the hands of God the destiny of the church and the destiny of the nations.
And that, as you just said so well, that creates capacities on the other level. [Speaker 2] (47:54 - 47:54)
Yes.
[Speaker 1] (47:55 - 49:29)
Which is to accept responsibility for an action within the realm that you have been placed inside. So rather than getting blackpailed about everything that's going wrong, why don't you make sure that your church is physically secure enough so that people can come and go from worship? Why don't you start there?
Why don't you make sure that, like, the pastor can survive if state persecution increases rather than saying, OK, we'll fix this and we'll fix that or we'll live in this fantasy world or we'll wait for this horrible thing to happen. Why don't you do what you can? And that is the that is the choice that I think like exposure to leftist arrogance or persecution on a lower level creates an individual people.
That is the kind of experience that will create resilience within the church. Sometimes overused is the saying of the North African church father to Italian that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. But what that means is that a church that survives through persecution is a church that is strong on both those levels because it is innocent as doves in its commendation of life and also death into the hands of God.
But it's also it's a church that are wise as serpents because you understand what is actually happening. What are the physical threats to the church building? What are the threats of well-being, of economic, you know, of employment to our church members because of the stance that they've taken for the sake of conscience?
[Speaker 2] (49:29 - 50:25)
Right. It's right. The church that forgets that it's the church militant will have persecution reminded why it is the church militant.
And you can't not be the church militant, even as you can't not be, I would say, the church triumphant, although sometimes Lutherans get really narrow on the way they talk about stuff. And speaking of that, I want to come back to that confusion of two kingdoms that you mentioned before, because I really think that's worth, I don't know, saying in American differently or something, you know, the so let me come at it from our our like back backyard, where in, you know, the idea that I would have a pamphlet available as you walk into the building that says nothing but this scientific evidence that face masks can damage your health published by the Federalists. OK, so the idea that I would have that there is me confusing the two kingdoms and being an unorthodox Lutheran LCMS pastor.
[Speaker 1] (50:26 - 50:26)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Speaker 2] (50:27 - 50:39)
And I say that's why we aren't almost Christian now in some way. And it looks like we're about to spit out. Right, I mean, yeah, that far, but I mean, OK, yeah, maybe one, two.
[Speaker 1] (50:40 - 50:52)
I think that what people think the two kingdoms means, we can debate the terminology, should it be governments, realms, whatever, I mean, on some level, who cares? The phrase people know if they know anything is two kingdoms.
[Speaker 2] (50:53 - 50:53)
Swords.
[Speaker 1] (50:54 - 52:31)
Yeah, swords. That's kind of cool. The two AR-15s, whatever is the confusion there is that it's presumptive passivity always and only on the part of the church.
The idea is there in Lutheran theology simply to say that church and state do different things. This is normal in Christianity. It's in the Bible.
It's actually fairly distinctive about us because most religions conflate church and state. The Roman pontifex is also the emperor. You know, the caliph is both a religious and a political figure in early Islam. Church and state just had different goals. State punishes wickedness, rewards goodness. Church leads men to salvation, which the state can never do.
They have different purposes. That's it. It's not a statement about relative passivity, forms of government, state church versus non-state church.
It's just a statement about different goals. OK, I mean, there's more you could say, but you can say that and be right. That doesn't mean that the church has no prerogatives over against the state, that there are things unique to the church, that the church gets to determine what divine worship looks like and doesn't look like, that the church gets to admit and exclude on its own basis, not on the state's basis.
So it's great if those things line up like I would love it if American family law lined up with biblical teaching on marriage and divorce. It doesn't. That doesn't mean that as the church, we stop enforcing biblical standards for marriage and divorce.
[Speaker 2] (52:32 - 52:35)
Well, we do, or otherwise we lose membership and then we have to close the churches. [Speaker 1] (52:35 - 53:42)
Yeah, well, let's see what happens. Right. Because what usually happens in America is that the prerogatives of the state or let's say more broadly speaking, the society or let's say as to its source generally, the media, what that asserts is what the church then takes as its own marching orders and then explains to itself in theological terms.
So whatever the latest covid fascination and obsession is, that's the definition of Christian love or whatever the state says. And this is just. People that don't know civics, whatever the state says, somebody that has a governmental seal on his podium during the press conference, that's what we have to enforce in the church.
And it's I mean, it sounds stupid because it is stupid, but it's extremely common and it's simplistic, but it is simple. Whatever they say, that's what we have to do. So then we do work for the state because the state doesn't even have to bother to send a cop to our church to enforce anything because we'll do it to each other.
No problem.
[Speaker 2] (53:42 - 54:11)
I had I did get it out of my mouth once. It was like a week after we were supposed to make a bunch of announcements and things about how, you know, you love your neighbor and putting a mask on a church. And I didn't I just didn't say anything.
And someone came up to me and said, Pastor, do I have to wear a mask today? And it was like one of the first people to get at church like the next week. And I just smiled. I said, you know, I'm not a policeman. I just left it. She kind of stared at me.
No, I'm your pastor. She's like, oh, OK. Yeah.
So what do you want to do?
[Speaker 1] (54:11 - 54:17)
Yeah, that's that's the distinction between the two kingdoms. Yeah, right. You're you're not an agent of J.B. Pritzker as far as I know.
[Speaker 2] (54:17 - 54:33)
No, I'm not. I'm not an ambassador to him. I'd love to have a conversation.
Call me sometime. He's probably a listener, so he won't be, but someone might eventually figure it out. I want to kill me.
And before you do, call me sometime. I promise it will help you. You're a puppet. I can free you.
[Speaker 1] (54:34 - 54:35)
Yeah, right. I mean, exactly.
[Speaker 2] (54:36 - 54:41)
I'm not lying, man. So you're taking that's what it's just sanity upside down. Go ahead. [Speaker 1] (54:42 - 55:04)
There you go. No, I. And so that's I think that that is it.
This is this is not a black pill. This is a thing I think about that could happen is that the church in the two Americas increasingly becomes two different churches, regardless of what's on paper as the denominational distinctive.
[Speaker 2] (55:05 - 55:05) Correct.
[Speaker 1] (55:06 - 56:00)
Because things that are plausible in Texas become implausible in Massachusetts. And the danger that we have there is that the levels of plausibility are solely designed by and around and for political media, social factors, not what is supposed to hold the church together, which is doctrine and ideology, let's say, more broadly, and then a life that accords with that. Yeah.
Jesus. Right. And so that is something that I think unless we plan otherwise.
And I know we have listeners and decision making capacities in higher levels than you or I, unless we plan otherwise collectively, if you're waiting for a civil war, it's already here in the church. Inside the church, it's a war of information.
[Speaker 2] (56:00 - 56:02)
It is not a war of bullets. It's a war of information.
[Speaker 1] (56:03 - 56:05)
Yeah, we are information warriors.
[Speaker 2] (56:05 - 56:06)
It's absolutely true, though.
[Speaker 1] (56:08 - 56:09)
It's absolutely true.
[Speaker 2] (56:09 - 56:16)
It's a war of publication. It's a war of of what is the news and is it good? And I'm not using that language unerringly at all, honestly.
[Speaker 1] (56:17 - 56:44)
Right. Right. Right.
And unless these things are planned for, you know, unless supplies, servers, provisions for a congregation, but for the stuff that we're trying to hold together above that level, which is and should be salutary, unless that's planned for if we're just planning to continue being reactive, if we're just planning to continue biting and devouring, then we will be consumed.
[Speaker 2] (56:44 - 56:46) I am.
[Speaker 1] (56:47 - 57:08)
So that is that's my concern going forward, is that we have a coherent response, regardless of how many martyrs are produced by whatever is going to happen, that we have a coherent response as the church so that there's one church, no matter how many Americas there end up formally, informally, no matter what kind of map you're looking at.
[Speaker 2] (57:08 - 58:35)
Yeah. Here, here. I completely agree.
So what I'm about to say is not a black pill thing at all, but it's not going to happen from the bodies. It's not going to happen from the parachurch organizations that call them church bodies, call themselves church bodies. It's going to happen within those groups by new what communities that arise, new communions that arise, who maybe sadly it won't be about communion, but that's what we got to make it about, by the way, like that really is what we should remember in all of this.
It's not going to happen from these organizations unless in them there is a coward who repents like I did, like you did, like all of us need to. So it's not just you. Right.
It's all of us. And we have to repent and decide that right now we were born to be in Babylon like Esther. We were born to be, oh, for goodness sakes, under the tyranny of the Philistines like Hannah.
OK, we were born to be in a place where we take any stand that we can. And if no one can get any of these bigger machines turning, if you've got a computer and you can get on discord and you can type in the phrase us comma the chill, you can find an online city of people working to at least encourage each other to be less reactionary, get off the thing and go do something for real about this stuff. You can also find the Brie Fisher Power channel there where I have to say, listeners, you're online a lot.
I'll just leave it there. Yeah, you're up, you're up, you've got to respond to that.
[Speaker 1] (58:37 - 59:09)
Yeah, I think that things inside and beyond the local body will either reform or they will prove themselves necessary or helpful or upbuilding or they will die, because when you're when you're in a time of sifting, you you really do find out very quickly what the chaff is. So we can either realize that that's happening. Or we can wait for it to be done to us, in which case much more will be lost.
[Speaker 2] (59:09 - 59:09)
Right.
[Speaker 1] (59:10 - 1:00:28)
And a united front and a united effort locally, translocally, whatever level that is going to be way more beneficial to way more people than just kind of complaining. And people on the discord and in real life tell me, well, what about I don't have this or that community? If you need to go join one somewhere else, I would seriously consider that.
If you can work well where you are or improve where you are, I would also encourage that, because whatever you can do, whether you're deep blue area, deep red area, whatever, the corrosion is coming for us all in a variety of ways. So even if you're in what you consider a safe place, maybe it is physically safer than living in San Francisco or something. Even there is a place that's being corroded in its soul.
And so this is a war of information and of steel and of fire for which we need to become men of fire and steel. And we can't do that if we're filled with foreboding and terror at all times. We need to pray so that out of prayer comes action.
[Speaker 2] (1:00:28 - 1:00:36)
Yeah, that's right. We're going to be men of wood and stone for us to be men of prayer. I just did some awesome stuff.
You just said right there, read the book by, is it a gear? A is I'm getting the last name, right?
[Speaker 1] (1:00:36 - 1:00:37)
Yeah. A gear.
[Speaker 2] (1:00:37 - 1:02:52)
Oh my goodness. Read. If you want to be ready as a man, I, I.
The last year I listened to this guy Coons talk to me. Okay. He recommended lots of stuff. He had lots of conversations. I bought a bunch of books. I have not read any of them.
I'm reading that one now. I mean, that's awesome. That is for sure.
What needs to be read by the average dude right now is the best picture of what we're going to have coming our way. Um, a note about these advertisements for these culture, like communes where the guy gets online and says, come and visit me, you know what? You should visit first and then like talk to people.
They're kind of see what the area is really like, figure out whether it's all just a sales pitch, you know, no matter who it is, that's nothing personal in this at all. Um, and then, uh, please forgive me. I mean, cause we're friends, right?
We're yeah. We're friends. The real thing here, the real question is the Barman declaration. Because in, you know, pre Nazi bad times, Germany, the Christians in the state run church, right? So, I mean, we have free churches rolling over. They had the state already running the church, the Christians in the state run church decide we're still believing Christians and look like half of us aren't, and we're going to say something about this and it became what for many is a Paragon moment, uh, of that time period and that they got together.
They made this thing called the Barman declaration. They said bad Nazis. And, and it, it was, I think in that way, a social movement that was important.
I haven't looked at it from, I want, that's why I'm asking. I want to hear your perspective. The, um, but I know that, um, I want to say a Bonhoeffer really becomes famous in part because of this.
Um, also I suppose the assassination attempt had something to do with that. Um, he did write a great book on the Psalms that you should read regardless of what anyone says about him. Um, and, uh, but then there was this guy who I like a lot and I wrote a book called without flesh that's basically based on an article he wrote in a book called lonely way, his name is Herman Sasa and Sasa was a big part of making Barman happen.
He was an ecumenical guy. He thought all that Christianity should get together and say, Nazi's bad. But then what happened was when they all got together, they tried to say, and we all take the Lord's supper together and we all believe the same stuff and we've rectified all the problems of the church being divided.
You know, what happened was it ruined everything and it didn't work at all. And I'm just curious. That's then again, what I was taught.
So what do you think Dr. Kuntz?
[Speaker 1] (1:02:52 - 1:03:41)
I think that the Barman declaration is something where when things begin to reform, right? Uh, let's say R E hyphen form reform because of massive political and social change, you're going to get combinations that are usually built around the lowest common denominator of whatever is most controversial. So in the case of Germany, the reason somebody like Karl Barth, who leaves Germany, but someone like Bonhoeffer who is, you know, Lutheran in maybe a historical sense of that word.
But just strictly speaking, ecclesiastically, he's a member of the Prussian union, which is a sort of combination from much earlier of Lutheranism with a reformed Christianity.
[Speaker 2] (1:03:41 - 1:03:49)
It's like a proto Methodist, right? No, no. It's on the way.
Like anyway, it's splicing things.
[Speaker 1] (1:03:50 - 1:05:32)
Um, I, I think that what you're going to get when you have controversy and something needs to be decided and fixed or done, right. Is that the thing that's controversial with people who are trying to work together is going to get put aside as much as it possibly can. And historically, that's totally understandable.
What that means is that the Barman declaration and the confessing church that's going to form around it really forms. And if you dig deep into some of these names and who these people are and the social strata that they come from, such as Bonhoeffer, they're usually urban bourgeois or they're academics or something like that. So their vision of the church and of Germany.
And that's also of politics is going to be shaped by a different motivation. That's going to motivate somebody who. Uh, not, not quite the same as Sasa and much less ecumenically active, but somebody like Vanner Eilert, who I mentioned in the last German episode, where they, what they're forming around are a set of things that are not theological and the theology will fall into line with that.
And this is a weakness when and where Protestants have to talk to each other is that the lowest common denominator prevails. I think that there are vastly different theologies and always have been inside the Roman Catholic church, but there's a preexistent organizational unity that is better for existential threats, such as burning of churches, murder of religious, et cetera, than where you have varying Protestant communions that somehow need to get along. And so it comes out canon, right?
I'm sorry.
[Speaker 2] (1:05:33 - 1:05:35)
They have a preexistent canon, which enables them to do that. [Speaker 1] (1:05:35 - 1:08:09)
Well, they have, they have a way of making decisions. And so if the people who make those decisions are in place, then the right decisions can be quickly and effectively made. It's also a strength of a group I mentioned earlier in American context, which is the Mormons.
They have a very clear hierarchy. That's really bad because of that hierarchy right now, for example, doesn't know what to do about Brigham Young university or sexual liberalization in the Mormon church. But they do have an enormous ranch in Florida that has tons of meat that they can keep, and they have all the Bishop's storehouses and stuff.
So when you don't have that, or you have a bunch of different hierarchies that need to get together. Then you're going to have enormous difficulty just practically. And what's going to go by the wayside when ideological things are in doubt are ideological things so that practical things can happen.
And that is neither here nor there. It's just something I see over and over and over again. So my guess would be that if we had to bring together the Lutheran church, Missouri Synod, and the Orthodox Presbyterian church in order to survive in, I don't know, the state of Maryland or something, whatever, I'm just.
Then what would fall by the wayside would be disagreements for the sake of keeping those churches physically open. Right. And within an American constitutional framework, churches can work together on all kinds of stuff to, for instance, keep churches open.
I wish that they did more of that in places like Maryland. Maybe they are. I don't know.
But that I think is the flaw in the Barman declaration and the confessing church that comes out of it is they effectively make a theological decision in relatively speaking, a big rush in order to present a political resistance to national socialism, especially that is echoed in other parts of the German church, but by people like Eilert who objects to the Aryan paragraph to requiring pastors only to be Aryans.
It's a regulation of churches, worship, and everybody says, no, I mean, it's okay if the entire church and the pastor are Aryans, that is not Jewish. But if the pastor is Jewish or half Jewish or something, that's also okay according to the word of God. And so we have to be governed by the word of God.
There are other theological controversies. That's one that everybody kind of agrees on. And those divide and they divide up the response.
And so they divide up the power of the response and, you know, and on we go. [Speaker 2] (1:08:09 - 1:08:19)
So when white towers are charged with the fight, sometimes they spend too much time planning and the fight's over maybe is one way to look at it.
[Speaker 1] (1:08:19 - 1:10:17)
Well, I think that if the churches had actually planned, especially people who, I mean, Bonhoeffer's family, for instance, are never on the right in any conceivable way within the spectrum of German politics, if they had said, oh, what happens if we no longer live in a liberal, permissive society? And if you live in the United States today, yeah, it's sexually permissive, but I mean, it's not permissive about masks, for example. So permissiveness is not exactly our sickness.
What if we don't live in that society that we grew up in anymore? How do we plan collectively for a future that seems much likelier than a return to the past? And when you're living reactively, not only are you unable to ask those questions, I think you're really unable to conceive of the fact that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, yeah, she might be dumb or something, but her existence in power with media promotion should tell you that the clock has already changed.
You're not going back. So you might as well stop reacting to the past or longing for the past and plan for the future. And if you don't do that, then you're forced into these really awkward situations where you're all sitting in a room and you're all like we don't like Hitler, but do we have anything else in common?
Well, not really. So some people are going to say we can't have a church on that basis. And some people are going to say we can.
And those who do are going to run into those problems down the pike. I mean, you see this in America with churches that oppose gay ordination. Right.
There's several Lutheran examples of that. They're against gay ordination. Well, they're turning out to have problems with approval of homosexuality because they still approve of women's ordination or they still say it's OK that the Bible is not verbally inspired.
So if you don't fix your problems ahead of time or anticipate problems collectively and make some decisions, they'll just metastasize.
[Speaker 2] (1:10:17 - 1:10:34)
If you don't have men who have an ideology that can lead you through the muck, then you're going to be driven by the storm. And and it's just kind of the way it's going to be. We're past our time for this week.
Is there anything else about the church into America's defense of the church at two levels you want to get into before we close this thing up, kind of send it on the way?
[Speaker 1] (1:10:35 - 1:10:57)
No, because we'll get into more of this next time and especially expand it also into American politics, where I think one of the benefits of learning about Spain and how the Spanish Civil War happened is that it enables you to see a scenario so much like our own and hopefully gives you more options, whether in church or state, for how to make the future better than it will otherwise be.
[Speaker 2] (1:10:58 - 1:11:05)
The Queen of Hearts, she stole them tarts and said, off with their head. You're listening to a brief history of power to white guys. You know where to find us or you would not be here.
[Speaker 1] (1:11:05 - 1:13:50)
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